Clear expectations and definitions

Participants highlighted the importance of being given clear directions about the rules and regulations to which they are being asked to comply. One participant explains the difficulty with ambiguity:

[In] the letter they gave me saying ‘we’re concerned that your living conditions unsafe’ they listed a bunch of things that they said were wrong.

But they didn’t give me a finish line ‘if you do this, it’ll be okay, if you do that it’ll be okay’. (P4)

This participant highlights the importance of the clarity of regulations through her implication that the demands will be never-ending in nature, thereby denying her a sense of security. One key informant echoed this perspective, stating:

I would guess, as a human, [it] would be very overwhelming. And so everything else that was talked about after, could be just, you know background noise in the back of his head, and he’s panicking thinking

‘oh my gosh, oh my gosh,’ so that’s why it’s important for me to make sure that it’s all in writing and he knows what the steps are, and what the timeframe is. (KI3)

She empathizes with the sense of being overwhelmed experienced by clients who hoard, and expresses the need to work closely with the client in identifying what the next steps are very clearly.

One participant recommends that people who hoard “find out the boundaries to which you have to cooperate” (P3), indicating that people who hoard should have clear guidelines about what is expected of them, as well as the limits of authority of the workers involved, as discussed later in this chapter. Similarly, another participant explains, “they didn’t know what laws I was breaking but they kept coming back and saying… they had to do this, it was ministry requirements. They [emphasis] never showed me what ministry requirements” (P4), questioning the legitimacy of the

requirements to which she was being held accountable. Ultimately, clear definitions and guidelines as to expectations not only provide a concrete goal to work towards, but a sense of security for participants. The reward of an accomplishment, or having less (or no) involvement from workers could serve to motivate people who hoard to work towards these goals.

2.1.4 Deadlines and timeframes

One of the techniques used by code enforcement officials and housing workers in particular, is to assign a timeframe or a deadline for a particular task. Participants’

reactions to the timeframes imposed by workers were varied, although most alluded to the overwhelming nature of having a deadline attached to the daunting task of sorting, organizing and discarding. One participant states “I found having that date, that final date felt like that’s the day you’ll be hung at noon on, from the scaffold until you die”

(P3), indicating the stress of the finality of a deadline for the completion of work. She went on to say “This final date looming over you…. it stressed me out to the point where I really found it hard to function. Even, like, other things, too” (P3), demonstrating that the deadline looming had the opposite effect than was intended, of hindering progress rather than advancing it.

Another participant indicates that the social service workers he engaged with were more flexible about deadlines:

Well I asked [name of worker] one time and she said ‘you have to get this done by a certain day’ and I said ‘well what happens if I’m not able to do that?’ and she said ‘oh well we just [laughing] put another date on it’. (P5) While this tactic of extending deadlines may seem counter-productive, it may help to mitigate the paralyzing pressure that participants experienced by having to adhere to strict deadlines. Meanwhile, another participant discussed the nature of the sorting and

organizing work, stating, “it’s like however much time you have is how long it takes to clear stuff out [laughs]. It’s not as though I would have started a year sooner and finished a year sooner. Because there’s no end” (P6). She identifies the cyclical nature of sorting, organizing and discarding, whereby items enter the home and have to be constantly

assessed, categorized and stored appropriately or discarded. Moreover, this participant identifies the paradox of assigning a firm deadline: with one the pressure is paralyzing, but without one, the process is both infinite and perpetual.

Conversely, one participant identifies the need for a deadline with regards to the eviction process:

It was like a horrible, horrible cross-examination by the prosecution that went on for three years and there was no finish line. There was no end of the court session where the judge bangs his gavel and says ‘okay I’ve made my decision. You leave her alone or else you’re out’. There’s no finish line. (P4)

For this participant, the ongoing involvement of workers was more stressful. She wanted finality and an end-date that she could work towards.

Key informants discussed different strategies surrounding assigning deadlines for tasks:

I’ve dealt with people for I think up to eight months.... [After working with that client] was probably when I said… ‘enough is enough here’. We gotta figure something else out. But usually if I come back in thirty days and I see they’ve made good progress I will schedule another appointment in another week and see how it’s going. And I’ve probably gone up to two months then. (KI8)

[G]enerally what I try to do with them too is not to overwhelm them. I always try to start with an area, so I’ll say, ‘You know what… we’ve got all this to deal with, what do you think you could get done for me if I gave you a week’s time and came back next week and followed up with you…?’… [I]f I come back the following week and they’ve done that, and I can move on to another section of it, and again, as long as I’m seeing progress, I don’t care if it takes me a year to work with somebody, I’ll do that. It’s when that progress stops and then I’m continuing to get complaints that then, you know, I may have to be a little bit more heavy-handed and just say, ‘Okay, here’s a letter, here’s your deadline’. (KI6) While there was no consistent, single approach taken by key informants, generally speaking, as long as progress continues to be made, the workers involved will extend deadlines and continue to work with the client.